This month South Africa celebrates the 38th anniversary of the June 16 Soweto uprising. It was the day young people took the streets of Soweto to demand meaningful and progressive education.  They mobilised around the issue of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction but beyond this, it was a process of claiming language, citizenship, land, education and freedom as Black bodies and minds within a suppressive education system, designed to reproduce them as labour.

Today, 20 years into democracy, their demands remain fundamental as there are still challenges and fragmentations in our education system. The maturity of any democratic society and the transformation of economic and social lived experience of a people depend on the access to good quality education.

As President Zuma mentioned in SONA  June 2014, South Africa is confronted by “the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment”.  Education is key to creating transformation in these areas. Our Bill of Rights stipulates that every citizen has the right to basic education, including adult basic education and further education. In order to overcome some of the challenges, institutions such as the Department of Basic Education (DBE) and the Department of Higher Education (DHE) have been established (a split of the former National Department of Education) in order to strengthen, transform and address our education needs.

The DBE is tasked with leadership, policy-making and the monitoring responsibility of improving the quality of learning and ensuring quality sustained education. The 2013 Delivery Agreement is a  binding document meant to strengthen monitoring and accountability.  In addition, ‘Action Plan 2014: Towards the Realisation of Schooling 2025’ focuses on 27 goals and outcomes that should  guide the process of integration, quality education and improved education systems. At the core of the goals is the recognition of the needs of people living in poverty, the working class, and rural based schools, et al.

Initiatives such as the Life Orientation Curriculum, the booklets Speak Out! Youth Report Sexual Abuse and Speak Out Freely,  the establishment of Girls and Boys clubs and  educator guidelines on how to engage sexual abuse of learners, show the government is, in some ways, responding to sexual abuse, harassment and bullying in schools.

Despite these efforts, more needs to be done because the culture of violence in schools is multi-layered:

• Corporal punishment is still practiced, educators and learners being the perpetrators of sexual violence within school settings; 
• When learners travel to school they are exposed to potential sexual harassment and risky behaviour due school transportation being seen as the responsibility of the learner or the parent. In some rural communities, learners walk for more than two hours to get to school.
• Transport is tricky in urban spaces where parents migrate learners to better financed  schools and in some situations, transport has been complicated by the merger or closure of certain schools, placing access to quality education further away from  township based homes.
• The lack of school sanitation infrastructure, where in some instances the bush becomes the toilet, makes learners vulnerable to sexual predators.
• Sex education can be expanded beyond HIV risky behaviour to include how to:
• address the stigma of teenage pregnancy as a way of preventing school drop-outs
• support young girls without access to sanitary wear to avoid school absenteeism and poor performance and
• teach positive sexual health and sexual reproductive health rights such as the right to safe and free abortions.

Civil society has played a critical role in strengthening systems through interventions that focus on art, therapeutic expressions and other forms of mobilising learners as active agents within the schooling system. Action Aid South Africa (AASA), (amongst their other critical education interventions) has chosen to focus on the promotion of access to education through working with Girls Clubs as a means of addressing sexual violence against girls in schools. AASA and three partners will lead the process of reducing the levels of sexual violence in 32 South African schools within a space of five years as just the beginning of the project. Through this project and other research work produced, it is clear that educators need more support in identifying and supporting learners affected by sexual violence in schools. Further, learners themselves must be upskilled to identify and report such incidences. The main challenge is not only to strengthen current systems but to mobilise learners and conscientise teachers to work towards preventative measures.

The right to education will never advance if quality education is not created within safe and violence-free schooling contexts. The failure of the public education system affects Black people living in poverty and further perpetuates systematic violence, exclusion and facilitates economic oppression.

Women and girls remain at the bottom pit of the cracks in such systems.

Written by Mbuso Ngubane, South Africa team, Communications Intern, ActionAid South Africa